Seattle Sounders FC and the Puget Sound soccer scene

July 31, 2011 3:57 am

Sounders goalkeeper Kasey Keller had an especially candid and interesting take on Seattle’s 3-1 loss tonight at Houston:

“I think we’ve been a little bit shaky defensively for a few weeks now. We finally got to a stage where we couldn’t outscore the opponent. You give away too many of those kinds of chances from 6 yards out, you’re going to lose some ball games. We’ve got to clean that up in our game. We’ve been talking about it for the last several weeks, and today we got punished because of it. It was a long trip, and you can make whatever excuse you want to make, but today Houston was better and deserved to win.

“(It’s) just frustrating. I have no problem is someone bangs one under pressure from the top of the box into the upper corner and we lose the ball game. But when you lose their leading goal scorer a couple of times inside the 6 and he’s wide open and he knocks the balls in, those are the concentration things that are frustrating, you know. … Just giving them chance after chance after chance is just something that we really have to get out of our game in a hurry if we want to make a run, because right now it’s just too easy for teams to score goals against us, and that’s just not the way that we normally are. Something bad is creeping in, and we’ve got to knock it out in a hurry.

On if he felt the PK that cut it to 2-1 might have been a turning point) I felt like it was the start of trying to turn the corner. They’ve had some of the same kind of defensive issues that we’ve had. I was talking to (coach) Dominic Kinnear before the game: I just don’t know how that team it’s only their sixth win because they have been shooting themselves in the foot. We thought maybe the penalty, now can we kick on here and see if we can make them shoot themselves in the foot again. But they dominated from the first minute to the last minute and there was no chance of us really getting back into the game.

On if the club missed Jhon Kennedy Hurtado against the big and direct Dynamo) Sure, and Zakuani and O’Brian White. Every team is always going to look at this stage of the season and say this guy is out from yellow cards, and this guy’s out from injuries and whatever – and it’s how well the guys that are on the field can step up and get the job done. And there’s no reason why the guys that we have can’t step up and do the job, and it just hasn’t been happening. But it’s nothing to freak out about. We’ve lost one game in 10, so it’s nothing to click any panic stations. It’s just that there have been signs of us being a little bit loose in the back over the last four or five games, and it’s just something that we need to clean up if we want to do what we want to do and push into the playoffs.

Blog search

Search for:

About

Don Ruiz has been covering the Seattle Sounders FC since their inception. Here he provides updates on news, views and developments of the South Sound soccer scene. Don also coordinates the UW Huskies Insider blog.

We welcome comments. Please keep them civil, short and to the point. ALL CAPS, spam, obscene, profane, abusive and off topic comments will be deleted. Repeat offenders will be blocked. Thanks for taking part and abiding by these simple rules.